Thermal Management in Ni/Al Reactive Multilayers: Understanding and Preventing Reaction Quenching on Thin Film Heat Sinks.

Thermal management is conventionally the design of microelectronics circuitry to maximize heat extraction and minimize local heating. In this work, we investigate a reverse thermal management problem related to understanding and preventing heat dissipation during the propagation of a self-sustained reaction in Ni/Al reactive multilayers, metastable nanostructures that can release heat through a self-sustained propagating exothermic reaction. While it was recently demonstrated that reactive multilayers can serve as on-chip heat sources for on-demand healing of metal films, they still face challenges of device integration due to conductive heat losses to the substrate or adjacent on-chip components, which act as heat sinks and consequently quench the reaction.

One-Step Bulk Fabrication of Polymer-Based Microcapsules with Hard-Soft Bilayer Thick Shells.

Microcapsules are important for the protection, transport, and delivery of cargo in a variety of fields but are often too weak to withstand the high mechanical stresses that arise during the preparation and formulation of products. Although thick-shell strong capsules have been developed to circumvent this issue, the microfluidic or multistep methods utilized thus far limit the ease of fabrication and encapsulation throughput. Here, we exploit the phase separation of ternary liquid mixtures to achieve a high-throughput fabrication of strong bilayer microcapsules using a one-step bulk emulsification process.